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2009 World Series Game Two Recap
The moment Mark Teixeira’s home run left the field, the party atmosphere at Yankee Stadium was restored. Up until then the atmosphere was tense and the crowd, which had been largely clammed up by the cold weather and Cliff Lee’s dominant pitching the night before, continued to be uncharacteristically quiet in the face of Pedro…
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2009 World Series Game One
Well, tonight’s game can be summarized in two words. Cliff Lee. There, quickest game recap ever! Well, okay, I suppose I can tell you some other things. There was soaking rain all day in New York, but it stopped around four o’clock and both teams were able to take batting practice outdoors. Worry about the…
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World Series Magic
It’s time to talk about signs and magic. In other words, do the Yankees have fate on their side? Every championship year seems to have its thread strung with some gems that presage special things happening. In 1996 the magic moments were things like Dwight Gooden pitching a no-hitter after all the adversity he had…
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ALCS Game 6: The 2009 Pennant is Won!
There was a party atmosphere in the Bronx prior to ALCS Game 6, as fans psyched themselves up to hopefully see their Yankees punch a ticket to the World Series for the first time in six years. “Tonight’s the night!” “Please let Pettitte have his stuff. Just let him have his stuff.” “The real fans…
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ALCS Game 5: Pitching, Pitching, Pitching
It was a game in which 280 pitches were thrown, but it was the very last one that decided it. It was a game in which no pitcher was happy. In tonight’s game, Phil Hughes took the loss, and in postgame interviews put all the blame on his own shoulders, but the Yankees’ six-run uprising…
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ALCS Game 4: Yankees 10, Angels 1
He has homered in three straight postseason games. He has now tied the record for consecutive postseason games with an RBI at eight. Sharing that record currently with Ryan Howard and Lou Gehrig. He has 11 RBIs thus far this postseason and a combined ALDS/ALCS average of .407. He is having the time of his…
Why I Like Baseball
AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF BASEBALL ENTHUSIASM, by CECILIA TAN
Welcome to “Why I Like Baseball”
“Why I Like Baseball” is the one of the oldest baseball blogs on the Internet, dating back to before the word “blog” existed. (I think it’s slightly older than Jay Jaffe’s “Futility Infielder,” and was slightly preceded by Geoff Young’s “Ducksnorts.”) I first hand-coded the site in HTML 1.0 at some point in 1998-99. (Most of the pre-2000 content has been lost to bit rot.) I had been away from baseball for much of my adult life, but the McGwire-Sosa home run race caught my attention I was underemployed at the time, had just published my first book of short stories with a major publisher, and was taking freelance writing gigs as I could find them, but what I really wanted to write about was baseball. So I took it upon myself to create a website. Back then, the Internet was smaller and less populated, and I soon discovered my little passion project was being read by folks like the editors of ESPN: The Magazine, who published a surprise shout-out to me. My writings eventually led to me writing a book on the Yankees, editing the Yankees Annual, writing for Gotham Baseball, and at one point even creating online content directly for the Yankees themselves.
Cecilia Tan
Writer